The Greatest of These
by northernexposure
Summary: A short epilogue to season nine's 'John Doe'. Doggett/Reyes.
1. Chapter 1

**The Greatest of These**

A short epilogue to 'John Doe'.

* * *

She was never supposed to be in Mexico at all, and now she has to drive the car back to the San Antonio office. She tries to get Doggett to stay with Skinner, who is sticking around to sort out the paper work and will fly back to D.C. tomorrow, but her partner flat refuses. He won't let the Policia Federal Ministerial medics check him over, either. He doesn't even want to stop somewhere so he can shower and change.

"Just get me the hell out of this place," he mutters, voice rasping like a dropped exhaust trailing in the desert dust. He slides into her passenger seat, grime and injuries and newly re-broken heart and all, as if the discussion is over. As if there has been a discussion at all.

For a moment or two she considers ignoring his request and driving him to the nearest hospital, but well intentioned or not that feels like a betrayal. So she buckles up and heads straight for the border at a speed she'd never get away with once they're on the other side of it. She churns through the dusty heat of her homeland as if leaving it behind will remove the past two weeks from her memory, and from his.

Most of their journey north is conducted in silence. She doesn't put the radio on and she doesn't speak, because she knows he will want neither of these things. Doggett spends most of the time staring out of the window, flickers of what she thinks must be him replaying memories adding spasms of new lines to his already creased face.

 _Luke._

Reyes swallows, hard, as a memory surfaces in her own mind – a horribly fresh one. Luke is nine years gone but the pain in Doggett's voice when he'd understood the reality of what she couldn't bear to say aloud was as fresh and bottomless as if those years had never happened. Yet now what pierces her even more than did the sight of him crumbling before her eyes is the memory of his voice in the seconds before he read the truth in her face. His voice in those seconds had been suffused with a quality of light and joy she'd never heard in it, spoken by the man he'd been before the source of that light and joy had been extinguished. Monica Reyes has always been aware that there is a distinct _before_ and _after_ in John Doggett's life, but in that moment she was made to understand, with an absolute and brutal clarity, that she has only ever known and will only ever know the _after_. Her Doggett is formed of the surviving, glued-together remnants of a man broken by a loss of such magnitude that her heart aches just to contemplate it, and aches even more to know she'll never truly see him otherwise.

Glancing at him now, at the pale flat planes of his face turned away from her, she thinks, _I will never know what he was then. I may one day know him healed, but I will never know him whole._

They cross the border and somewhere not far north of it she decides she's not going via the San Antonio office. They can wait for the car until another agent needs to take a trip down from D.C. She cuts east on the 59 as the sun finally begins to dip lower in the sky.

She keeps driving, gripping the wheel so hard that her knuckles turn white.

* * *

A little ways south of New Orleans she glances over to see he's asleep. Doggett's head lolls at an awkward angle that cannot possibly be comfortable. The bruise over his eye shines with a sick black petroleum gleam in the reflected orange lights from the highway, now in darkness.

Reyes pulls to stop outside the booking office of the Happy Avenues motel. By the time she's got the keys for two rooms, Doggett is awake. She walks out to find him standing beside the open door of the car, his filthy shirt hanging limply off him like a skin he should have shed long ago.

"We don't need to stop," he says, the familiar roughness of his voice strange after so much silence. "I can take over the driving. Let's just go right on through."

She holds out a key. The yellow fob has a large number nine on it. "Go take a shower, John. I'll head over there and find you a change of clothes." She nods to a strip mall a block's walk back down the highway.

For a second he looks as if he might argue, but she's got the car keys and she knows there's not enough left in him for a fight. He snags the room key as he passes her. She watches until he's through the door, notices the slight stagger he tries to hide, the stiffness in his movements.

Thirty minutes later she's back at his door, pushing it open to the sound of his rasped, "Yeah, it's open."

Reyes steps inside to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, his hair damp and a white towel wrapped around his waist. His naked torso is a testament to the beatings he's suffered, his skin mottled and in places raw. His movements in the shower have reopened one of the cuts. It seeps blood onto his clean skin with the laziness of a glacier, so slowly he appears not to notice.

Doggett stands up, holding a hand out for the bags she's carrying. "Thanks. I'll just-"

"Sit down," she tells him.

"Monica-"

"Sit down."

He does as he's told and she puts down the bags to shrug off her jacket before reaching inside for the medical supplies she's bought. When she kneels in front of him, Doggett tries to shy away.

"Agent Reyes, thanks for the concern, but-."

"Agent Doggett, either you let me do this, or I put you in the car right now and drive you to the nearest hospital."

He blinks. "I was going to say, I can do this myself."

"Sure you can," she agrees, as she rips open a pack of sterile wipes. "But you won't. This might sting a little-"

Doggett sucks in a sharp breath as she goes to work on the abrasions littering his skin, but he doesn't say another word. She can feel his eyes on her face as she slowly cleans each cut, tapes the largest one shut and covers it with gauze, pastes arnica onto his bruises. Reyes wonders, briefly and with the full knowledge that her wondering is inappropriate, how long it has been since he's had a woman's fingers touch him. Has there been anyone since Barbara? Surely there must have been, but somehow she can't imagine it. Perhaps it's only that she does not want to. His skin is warm, but she brushes it only lightly, afraid to hurt more where too much hurt has already been given.

"You know what I don't get?" he mutters. "How I managed to remember at all. All those others – the disappeared ones – how come none of _them_ even had a flash of memory the way I did?" Doggett pauses, lets the silence linger, and when he speaks next his voice is even lower, "It must have been the pain, right? Even when my mind wasn't my own any more, it just couldn't forget Luke. Because it hurts so damn much that it's cut right down into me, so deep there's no getting rid of it, no matter what mental mumbo-jumbo anyone tries. What kind of universe makes that kind of pain the only thing that can pull us back from a brink that steep? What kind of universe is cruel enough to make _that_ the one thing that endures?"

Reyes finishes her task as the flow of his words washes over her. She's missed his voice, she realises, as fractured and rough as it is. She has missed his voice as much as she's missed his face, as much as she's missed him. She turns her hand over, strokes his chest lightly with the backs of her fingers, and looks up at him.

"I don't think it was the pain," she tells him, softly, watching the ebb and flow of grief in his blue eyes. "You didn't remember Luke's death first. You remembered his life. You remembered _him_. It was the love of him you recalled, not the loss of him. It wasn't pain that saved you, John. It was love."

He glances away, looking around the room. "I don't know this place," he says, after a few moments. "Might sound stupid, but… I don't want to wake up somewhere I don't recognise. Not again."

She pushes herself to her feet. "We can't drive through the night. We're both too tired."

Doggett nods. "I know, but-"

"What about me?" she says, quietly.

He looks up at her. "What?"

"What if you woke up to me? Would I be familiar enough?"

They stare at each other for a few moments. She sees a million questions flit through his eyes, but knows they're both too exhausted in too many different ways to explore a single one. Instead she toes off her shoes and pulls off her sweater and slacks, leaving everything else in place. She walks around the bed and slides beneath the coverlet, lying on her side. Doggett turns to look at her for a moment, then picks up the bag she brought and disappears into the bathroom. He reappears a few minutes later wearing a T-shirt and a pair of boxers.

He slides into the bed and mirrors her pose, facing her with one hand resting beneath the pillow under his cheek, the other flat on the bed between them. They look at each other, 12 inches and an ocean between them.

"Sometimes I dream," he tells her. "Bad dreams, I mean. About-" Doggett stops. "You should just be warned, because now I remember everything… Sometimes I wake up. Shouting, screaming…"

"It's all right," she tells him, laying a hand over his.

"Okay," he says, and she sees his Adam's apple bobbing up and down as he swallows.

"Shut your eyes. Go to sleep. I'll be here."

She watches him drift away from her. His fingers twitch under her hand. His legs move, tensing as if he's back in the corps, running towards something she can't see.

[TBC]


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** I thought that last chapter was it, but then I found I wanted to see what happened next.

I like to think that when Audrey Pauley says to Doggett, 'You love her, though', she's pulling focus on something he's been trying to keep blurred for a while.

* * *

John Doggett wakes to the pale gleam of a new day's light. It has found its way in around the edges of the faded curtains of his motel room. He lies with his head on an unfamiliar pillow, eyes closed, keeping still as he waits for and then registers the arrival of a sensation that he has come to expect every morning for the past nine years. A sharp pulse of pain awakens itself in his heart, stabbing as it does with fresh energy every time he wakes into the memory of what his life has lacked for those long nine years. This pain, he knows, will accompany him through the rest of the day. It will not always be as acute as it is now, but it will always be present. Occasionally it will steal up on him unawares, lunging out of the background of his day to fill his mind like an off-key note jangling at an unbearable volume, loud enough to rupture every capillary beneath his skin.

It is an irony not lost on him that on this particular morning, this memory is a sign of healing. The last time he woke up, he woke not to this quantifiable agony, but to a nothingness so absolute it didn't even have a name. Agony this may be, but at least it is his. At least it is _him_ , returned to himself. Most importantly it means that Luke is not lost to him, or at least not entirely.

It isn't until he opens his eyes and sees her that Doggett remembers he is not alone. Monica Reyes is lying beside him, curled on her side, still asleep.

He doesn't remember waking in the night, and for her sake he hopes that he didn't. In fact, he feels as if he slept well, although that could simply be because he _has_ slept. Since this whole thing started he can't have had more than a night's worth of rest in the two weeks put together. His disappearing sense of self, drowning beneath that heavy tide of forgetting, was receding too quickly to let him lose yet more to sleep.

Doggett has the vague feeling that he should get up, shower and dress. That would surely give Reyes time to awake herself, negating any awkwardness that might be associated with them finding themselves in the same bed. But the knowledge fails to promote an action. Instead he stays still, for some reason keen not to wake her, not yet. Her dark hair has drifted over her face, but he can still make out the slight line between her eyes, the one he has come to associate with the sight of her frowning as she concentrates on something. He wonders when he first started to notice that about her and cannot come up with a definitive answer. It is a knowledge that has come upon him gradually, one of a growing catalogue of facts about Monica Reyes that he has collected and filed away without consciously making an effort to do so.

She'll want coffee when she wakes up. She drinks it black and far too sweet. She'll want a cigarette, too, but she won't have one. She won't eat breakfast unless he physically picks something up for her, not because of some absurd diet plan but simply because she always forgets to get something for herself. On a normal day, back in Washington, she'd go to the gym before coming into their little basement office, so perhaps this morning she'll want to go for a run before they set off for the last fifteen hours of the solid driving that will get them back to D.C. She drove fast and straight yesterday and he never once offered to take over until they'd already stopped. Her legs are probably stiff as all hell. She didn't even take time for a shower before she got into bed last night. She didn't take time for herself at all.

He watches her steady breathing stir the strands of hair that lie across her face and something unplanned for constricts his chest. He worries about it, but then it's probably just because it's been a long time since he woke up to a woman in his bed. She must know that. He's been more alone in the past two weeks than he has been for the nine lonely years that preceded them, and she knows that, too. It's why she's here, isn't it, instead of on the other side of the flimsy wall behind this bed? He remembers falling asleep to the warm weight of her hand on his. Monica Reyes can be perplexing, frustrating and at times downright infuriating, but so far she has proven to be the most selfless partner he's ever worked with. He knows from Skinner that she wasn't supposed to come to Mexico – it's why she was sent back north so swiftly. There'll be hell to pay from Kersh for disobeying orders no matter the successful outcome, and she must have known that would be the case. But she came anyway.

She mutters something and turns on her back, her hair still over her face. At first he thinks she's waking up and his heart does a strange double beat in his chest as if his body is preparing for flight. But Monica is still asleep, muttering something, frowning to herself, apparently agitated by whatever dream is flitting through her frontal cortex. Before he realises what he's doing he's leaning over her, reaching out to smooth that hair away from her face. The action shocks him mid-movement and he freezes, his fingers on her cheek as her eyes open. She stares up at him and lifts her hand to cover his where they rest on her face.

"John?"

She says it sleepily and with slight confusion, and the sound of his name in that voice is suddenly so intimate that something he doesn't want to believe is even there turns over in the pit of his belly.

"Hey," he whispers, in a voice far lower and rougher than he intended. He clears his throat and removes his hand. "You were dreaming."

She blinks, dispelling the last vestiges of sleep from her eyes. "Sorry."

"No, I-" he's not at all sure where he was going with that sentence, so he lets it hang.

"How are you feeling?" Her dark eyes search his, that little line between her eyes furrowing deeper.

"I'm OK. Little sore, but – I'll be OK."

She smiles. "I was half afraid you'd wake up and have forgotten everything again."

He shakes his head. "No. No, I… remember."

Something flinches in her eyes. "Sorry."

"Not your fault." He keeps looking down at her, thinking, _I should really move now_. But something he is not willing to define is keeping him there, watching her as she watches him. Her gaze drifts down to his lips and in the split-second that it takes him to register the movement she's flicked it hurriedly back up to his again. Then she's moving and he's sitting back, wondering what just happened and at the same time, with another sparking, spinning pulse in the pit of his stomach, he is completely and utterly certain that he knows.

"What time is it?" she asks, pushing herself up, glancing past him to the motel clock, which reads 8.23am. "We should probably get going."

She's wearing a black T and simple black cotton panties that are so lacking in provocation that they wouldn't have broken military regs. Yet when she gets out of bed he suddenly finds he wants to look at her legs so badly that he has to turn away.

He can hear rustling as she pulls on her slacks. "I'll head next door and have a shower," she says. "See you at the car in 20?"

"Sure," he manages, but by that time she's already at the door and in the next moment she's through it and gone. A few seconds later he hears the door to the room next door open and close, followed by her faint footsteps crossing the room.

Doggett shuts his eyes and leans back against the faintly peeling paint of the wall behind his head. He takes a breath and lets it go, feeling the myriad tiny aches from the bruises on his torso. Swapping one pain for another often works, he's found.

He gets up and heads for the shower. He strips off the clothes she bought him and stands under the warm jets of water, trying not to imagine her doing the same.

[END]


End file.
